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Living Through a Pandemic

Kari L. Blazek

Youngstown State University

NURS 6900: Healthcare Issues and Trends

Dr. Valerie O’Dell

July 2, 2021
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Living Through a Pandemic

Beginning my career as a new nurse during the start of an international pandemic was

interesting to say the least. I started as nurse in October of 2019. By the time I completed my

orientation at my job it was January of 2020. Mask mandates and lock down began by the end of

March 2020. I had three months of adjusting to being on my own and really understanding the

common diagnoses and care plans for what my unit sees before having to adjust to the unknown

of COVID-19.

When the pandemic started, I felt that it was all eyes on nurses, doctors and the healthcare

teams as a whole. People did not know what to do or how to act. Once I realized that COVID

was a real threat to my life, my family, my community, I felt this overwhelming sense of

responsibility. This is my time to be a role model to those around me such as wearing a mask,

social distancing, staying home, being cautious and following recommended guidelines and

encouraging others to do the same. I was responsible for keeping my patients safe from me and

the virus at work. My overall gut feeling when everything started was, what about the nursing

staff, what about other healthcare workers and what about our patients?

At the time I worked on a small high-risk obstetrics unit. When the pandemic started and

everything started shutting down, all of inpatient women’s health dropped in census. Patients

were scared to come, trying to leave as soon as possible and providers were doing their best to

manage outpatient. This is when I began feeling this terrible sense of guilt. Here I am annoyed

that I am being called off for low census when other nurses are being overwhelmed with new

COVID patients and the floors are still scattered on developing new workflows for the situations

that are arising. This is when I signed up for redeployment to help.

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I was ready to help in any way that I could. I know that a medical-surgical floor is not for

me but, no one signed up to be a COVID nurse either. I knew this was going to be temporary and

it was going to get bad, but I wanted to be in thick of it; helping people, saving lives and holding

hands of those that are beyond saving.

After a few weeks of working my redeployment assignment, women’s health started

seeing their uptick in pregnant COVID women who now needed inpatient care. Now I was

drawn back to the population I knew best and was ready to take on whatever necessary to keep

these moms from an early delivery and a maintain a safe pregnancy.

As the pandemic is now winding down and becoming much more manageable, I have

learned that I am so much more flexible, resilient and experienced. I feel as though I have double

the experience, I actually have due to what I have faced in the last year and half. Going through

this pandemic has really helped shape me into a better nurse and the most crucial time in my

career and for that I am thankful. I like to think that for every bad day that I have, there is a good

story or experience I carry with me.